


martâ

by Askance



Series: Mashiach [6]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Blood, Implied Future Character Death, M/M, Mild Implied Incest, Religious Content, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Stigmata
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-01
Updated: 2013-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-30 00:11:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/693114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s a sign on the side of the two-lane highway leading back through the trees to the motel, wavering uncertainly on its two thin metal legs poked into the ground. <em>Swap Meet, </em>it says, in cheerful red letters. <em>Hosted by First Lutheran. 802 West Lazarus. Today!</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	martâ

There’s a sign on the side of the two-lane highway leading back through the trees to the motel, wavering uncertainly on its two thin metal legs poked into the ground. _Swap Meet,_ it says, in cheerful red letters. _Hosted by First Lutheran. 802 West Lazarus. Today!_

Dean’s duffel is full of new packages of gauze in crisp plastic packets, a new set of bandage clips, a package of washrags. The date on his watch’s face is May 2nd ; it’s early afternoon. He left Sam asleep back at the hotel to run into town for supplies—the poor kid has been drifting in and out of waking all morning. He probably doesn’t even remember that today is his birthday. But Dean does.

He takes the slow right onto Lazarus. Over the treetops the sky is low and grey and curling, the wind cool for a summer’s day, and the sun hangs low and strange. It’ll storm before too long.

First Lutheran is a neat little church, like something out of a storybook: white clapboard steeple, piercing up into the clouds. A cement sign proclaims a Bible verse to the street in stark black stock letters:

_HE WHO BELIEVES IN ME WILL LIVE, EVEN THOUGH HE DIES - JOHN 11:25_

Dean parks beside the sign, bumper nudging into the late spring grass, and stares at it as he swings out of the Impala’s front seat. The wet breeze pushes against his face like intruding fingers.

There are tables set up in front of the church’s stoop, the long plastic kind with legs that fold out; white tablecloths cover them, anchored down with stones at each corner, the loose ends fluttering in the wind like curtains or clothesline leavings. Women in floral print summer dresses, most with the short grey hair of the elderly, lean across them, smiling cordially with milling guests, pointing to this and that. A few children sprint through the little gathering, playing tag; soccer moms holding cups of lemonade drift through the tables; a man in black livery stands on the church stoop raising his hand to everyone who passes.

Dean thinks of Sam, lying in the cool dark, very quiet and small in his bed and his bandages. He wonders what these people would do, if they knew what he knows about the world, about his little brother’s hands and feet.

He slips in among them, feeling a little as if he is floating above them, a sore thumb in his leather jacket and worn-in jeans. Their eyes slide right over him if they catch on him at all; he looks up at the steeple, tilting, and then down at the table to his right, with a white sign zip-tied against its legs along the front. _From our Friends at St Lucy’s Catholic Church._ It’s the only one of its kind, and Dean finds it a little odd that a Lutheran swap meet is sharing space with a Catholic seller, but how is he to know how these things work? People of faith, at any rate, he supposes.

The young woman who sits behind the table has long dark hair and looks forlorn—a quick glance at her stock tells Dean why. She’s hardly sold anything. There are little circular plastic containers full of beads, a few rows of haphazard God’s eyes with a paper sign ( _made by St Lucy’s Sunday School_ ), small wooden crucifixes of the sort that are propped against a wall rather than hung; little statuettes of St Francis of Assisi with birds perched on his ceramic hands. Dean catches sight of two little red dots on each of his palms and looks away.

“Bad business?” he says, and the girl looks up at him through the veil of her hair. She has a little sticker nametag on her blouse: _Mary._

She smiles, a _what can you do_ kind of smile. “It’s an interfaith outreach thing or somethin’,” she says, in a surprising drawl. “Don’t know why we even bother in a small town like this.”

Dean pushes his hands into his pockets, surveying what she has. Mary watches him, looking vaguely hopeful.

He feels the curve of his watch dig into his jeans and remembers the date—May 2nd . Thinks of Sam in the cool room. He probably doesn’t even remember that it’s his birthday. He’s having trouble keeping track of any time at all these days, more interested in the motel Bible or looking in contemplation at the wall, or listening quietly to Dean’s attempts at conversation. He exists in the hermetic seal of the room, neither caring for the passing of the world outside nor wishing to care; his birthday probably means exactly less than nothing to him right now. Dean has seen him begin to lock his eyes on death, and is beginning to understand that.

“What are these?” he asks, picking up one of the plastic boxes full of beads.

“Rosaries,” Mary says. She peers at him expectantly, as if ready to explain what it is if he doesn’t know.

“Right. For praying.” He twists the top of the box off, gently tips the rosary into his hand. Its beads are a bright red, the chain golden; the tiny medallion of the Virgin Mary is rough with detail under his fingertips. They own rosaries, of course, but most are wooden, water-bloated, stripped of any colour from the process of making holy water. This one is smooth, new, and the beads roll coolly in his palm.

Sam would like this, he thinks. It’s a colour he loves, this blushing red. He remembers Sam’s little fingers, when he was much younger, always toying with the rosary that hung from the spine of their dad’s journal, never quite able to yank it out, for whatever reason.

And it’s his birthday.

If Dean’s being brutally honest with himself, on the lawn of the Lutheran church, it’s going to be his last birthday.

He ducks his head, looks at the rosary piled in his hand like a palmful of blood.

“How much?” he asks.

Mary shifts, readjusts on her seat, pulls one curtain of her hair back behind her ear. “Ten dollars,” she says.

Dean nods—lets it clatter back into its plastic case with the white paper price sticker on the bottom. He hesitates as he draws his wallet out—reaches across and selects one of those little wooden crucifixes, humbly carved, hardly anything special, but he knows Sam will like that, too. An icon he can hold in his hands.

“That makes twenty,” Mary says softly, with reluctance; she’s looking at his face as if she understands at least in part the thoughts clouding behind it, or suspects. “But I’ll make it fifteen.”

He nods, feeling light-headed. Wet thunder murmurs a ways out to the west and he pulls the crumpled bills from his wallet, hands them to her; he watches her pale fingers fumble with the cash box, watches them drop his buyings into a white plastic bag with the St Lucy’s logo splashed cheerfully across its slick face. When she places it into his hands she says, “Thank you.”

Dean clears his throat. “Thank you,” he says in return, mustering a smile.

“God bless,” she says.

For a moment he stares at her, thin and frail in her summer cardigan and long skirt, her hair picked up by the wind. Her doe eyes. She has no idea what he’s going back to, what he stands to lose when he walks out of the secluded bubble of contentment on the lawn of this church—back to a pale motel room lashed by the sounds of distant traffic, to clean wounds that won’t heal, to sit in an armchair and watch the one person he loves most waste slowly away, starving for God.

She is selling figurines of St Francis, but no one sees the holes in his hands. They only see the birds, and smile.

_God bless,_ she’d said.

He wants to say, _oh, He has. That’s the trouble._

He swallows hard and nods, fists the top of the bag in his hand, and turns to go.

The old women are packing up the things unsold into cardboard boxes lined with bubble wrap, talking over the wind; the soccer moms are draining their lemonade like scotch and rounding up the kids, tucking plastic bags into their purses; the reverend is nowhere to be seen. Dean glances once at the open door of the church and thinks that the soft blackness inside must have swallowed him. The wind is gusting, driving in the rain, and already stray drops are falling, setting the air thick. He moves against the push. Sits down at the wheel of the Impala just as the rain starts falling in earnest and the old church biddies cover their old grey hair with their hands.

For a long time he sits there, watching them hastily pack away their things, the bag of gifts sitting in his lap. It’s Sam’s birthday, and while Dean would love nothing more than to be able to walk in and say, _happy birthday, Sammy, you’re going to live—happy birthday, Sammy, I can save you—_ this is all he has to give him—a few beads and a dying wooden man.

He drives before he can throw them both out the window.

———

Sam lifts his head when Dean opens the door, blinks back sleep, smiles weakly. “Where’ve you been?”

“Supply run,” Dean says, dropping his duffel on the dinette. A packet of gauze falls out; the plastic bag follows, with a little thud. Dean looks at it for a moment and then picks it up, holding it in his hands, examining the logo on the front.

Sam leans his head forward, curious.

“I, uh.” Dean clears his throat, takes a step forward, holds it out toward him. “Got you something.”

Sam takes the bag gingerly between the fingertips of both hands, lets it rest on his covered lap.

“Happy birthday,” Dean says, trying to muster a smile. He sits down on the edge of the mattress, his heart in his throat.

Carefully Sam pulls the two gifts out, the cylinder rosary box and the little carved Christ.

He stares at them; places them neatly side by side on his lap; fumbles with unscrewing the box’s lid and Dean reaches over to do it for him, tipping the rosary into Sam’s bandaged palm where it coils and drips like liquid, the heavy golden cross on its end dangling, red beads spilling like blood.

He is very quiet for a long time. Dean watches his face relax the longer he looks at them; he turns the crucifix over, brushes his fingertips down its edges and faces, strokes Jesus’ outstretched arms; his fingernail traces the woodburned signature etched into its back. He strings the rosary between his fingers, like a trail of carnival lights, every bead gleaming dimly in the failing sunlight, glinting in its own gold, and he smiles, truly smiles, like a child enchanted by a mother’s pearl necklace.

Then he looks at Dean, and his smile fades, and says nothing still.

Dean smiles too, sadly, and reaches up to smoothe a strand of hair behind Sam’s ear.

“Look,” he says, ducking his head. “I’m—I’m not going to tell you that I understand.”

His fingers fidget where they are folded loose between his knees.

“I don’t. I don’t understand. I really don’t.”

Faintly rain begins against the window, now.

“But—neither do they,” he says, gesturing back and away towards the road leading to West Lazarus, the barren swap meet, the cement signpost. Catholic Mary and her long hair and her full table, listening to the summer talk. “No one—no one could sit here and look at this, at you, and—and _know_. Because it’s not for us.”

He bites the inside of his lip and the rosary rolls and rolls in Sam’s palms.

“It’s not for us. It’s for you.”

Sam looks away from him, down at the gifts.

Tears sting Dean’s eyes like rain, but he’s not surprised to feel them. They’re soft and warm and they don’t fall.

“That’s what I get now,” he says. “I don’t need to understand this, or why you want it. Or why it’s you in the first place. Or what’s going to happen—or when.”

He touches Sam’s wrist, bone-china white, grasps it just hard enough to feel the sluggish pulse.

“I just need to trust you,” he says. “Yeah? Because you know. You understand, you’ve—you’re okay. In the end, with this. You get it, and you know how it goes, and—you’re happy in it.”

Sam nods. The rosary slips from his hand and he pulls it back, until Dean’s palm is pressed against his, one warmth caught between two skins, flat to one another.

“Then that’s okay,” Dean says. Gently the lights flicker under the drive of the storm, but don’t stop burning. He swallows hard, leans forward, bowing his head to hide his face, as if to worship or revere, and Sam sits still, watching him.

“That’s okay,” Dean says. “I can—I can believe in that and then—then that’s okay.”

_He who believes in me will live, even though he dies._

He imagines Sam breathing out his last rise and fall, tomorrow, a week from now, a month—his red birthday rosary coiled around his hands, perhaps, or the tiny crucifix laid on his breast, and his eyes closing, and the world emptying of colour, and it will happen, soon, and just as with every other time, something in Dean will die, but now—now he can imagine that the sun will rise after it, somehow. It isn’t so hard to believe in something like that, when Sam lies at its center, the golden medallion promise at the end of the trail of beads.

Mary listens to the Teacher talk but Martha talks back. Martha marches out to meet the Messiah and shouts that she believes in him for all the world to hear, and then the stone rolls back and Lazarus breathes, and that is how the story goes.

**Author's Note:**

> This series belongs in part to Casey, whose contributions can be read [here](http://whiskyandoldspice.tumblr.com/fanfiction).
> 
> Martha of Bethany, sister of Mary and Lazarus, was a friend of Jesus, and proclaimed her belief in him at Bethany.


End file.
